How Will Google Analytics Changes Affect Your Business?

In July 2023, Google is letting go of Universal Analytics and migrating to Google Analytics 4. In addition to the user interface differences, it’s different from Universal Analytics by moving from being a session-based database to being event-based. Event-based data gives you more insights and deeper analytics and ultimately enables you to become more user-centric. It’s also designed to prioritize privacy by Google Analytics 4, giving you precise control over what personal data is collected and stored.

Google Analytics 4 will allow the incorporation of machine learning and direct integration with BigQuery, and provide more ability to do cross-platform and cross-device tracking. These improvements will help fill in the gaps from the deprecation of third-party cookies and give us more power to leverage data.

Finally, developers are going to love the Debug View. This allows you to enter debug mode in Google Tag Manager, test events and see what data is sent to your GA4 property in real-time. The implementation of these new events is a vast improvement.

These changes will affect your business as Universal Analytics will no longer process new hits starting July 1, 2023. It’s time to develop your GA4 implementation strategy and begin the switch. If you want to continue collecting year-over-year data analytics, we recommend implementing Google Analytics 4 by July 2022. 

We would LOVE to help you get ahead of this shift to ensure your data collection continues smoothly.